George Hunka

Notes and comment

Category: Opera

  • Opernabend: Don Giovanni

    The Stavovské divadlo (Estates Theater) in Prague, where Don Giovanni premiered in 1787.

    Tomorrow’s offering on radio klassik Stephansdom‘s Opernabend will be Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Thomas Allen in the title role, Simone Alaimo as his sidekick/henchman Leporello, and Karita Mattila as Donna Elvira, in a 1991 recording performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner.

    Certainly among the most highly regarded operas ever composed, Don Giovanni demonstrates to me the extraordinary intellectual and emotional range of the Classical period, a range usually accorded to the music of the Romantic era. The aesthetic restrictions of the Classical period, borrowing something from the Baroque, encouraged a demanding focus of expression often dissipated by the wild emotional, subjective imaginings of the Romantics, Beethoven excepted (Beethoven always excepted from generalizations like this). Don Giovanni ranges from the comic, leering, lascivious skirt-chasing of its title character in Act One to a vision of the jaws of Hell at its conclusion, which is to say that it contains just about everything from sex to death. As such, it’s had an impact on musicians and philosophers ever since its 1787 premiere in Prague, conducted by the composer himself. Flaubert called Don Giovanni one of “the three finest things God ever made” (it was in good company; Hamlet and the sea made up the remainder of the trio), and a discussion of the opera introduces the central ideas behind Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

    Whether Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute (or any other of his operas) is Mozart’s best is a matter for cocktail party sniping, but it certainly ranks up there, and therefore ranks as one of the best of all operas. radio klassik Stephansdom airs Don Giovanni tomorrow, Saturday, October 3, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; you can stream it here. Barrie Kosky’s insightful production for the Wiener Staatsoper, which some will no doubt find rather grim but which I find rather wonderful, is available at Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ platform; the trailer for the Vienna production is below.

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  • Opernabend: Rienzi

    Rienzi at the 2026 Bayreuth Festival in a production designed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.

    Tomorrow, Saturday, September 19, radio klassik Stephansdom offers Richard Wagner’s 1842 Rienzi on its Opernabend program at 2:00 pm Philadelphia time and 8:00 pm Vienna time. A brief synopsis from Wikipedia:

    The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had initially urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

    Barry Millington reports that the original 1842 Dresden production, featuring one of Wagner’s favorite mezzo-sopranos Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as Adriano, ran with intermissions from 6:00 pm to the other side of midnight. “[There] are elements of grand opera throughout both parts of the work; in the spectacular mises-en-scène (massive crowd scenes, dramatic excommunications, collapsing buildings and so forth) … and in the abundance of marches, processions and ballets. … The grandiloquence of the music may perhaps be seen as a reflection of the extravagant pomp and ceremony that were perceived — by an anonymous contemporary biographer of Rienzi — to have been the cause of the demagogue’s downfall.” Wagner biographer Ernest Newman called Rienzi an “attack of musical measles” (ouch!) and Charles Rosen cheekily described it as “Meyerbeer’s worst opera,” but Mahler considered Rienzi one of the greatest of Wagner’s music dramas. So your own mileage may vary.

    Although Rienzi‘s reputation has suffered compared to the rest of Wagner’s corpus (a year later Wagner conducted the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer, the earliest of truly Wagnerian operas, in Dresden), its populist political theme as well as its comparative rarity in live and recorded performance are apparently rendering it more attractive to producers and musicians today; this year saw its first-ever production at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. Gaby Reucher considered the implications of its contemporary production for Deutsche Welle in July.

    While Rienzi was Wagner’s first great success, later in his career the composer tended to dismiss it as a minor work, but it wasn’t minor for everybody. In his diaries, Albert Speer recorded a comment from Adolf Hitler to his Nazi comrade Robert Ley; Hitler described the impact of Rienzi, a production of which he had possibly seen as a teenager in 1906 or 1907 in Linz, on his own political ambitions:

    You know, Ley, it isn’t by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi. It’s not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.

    The manuscript of Rienzi has disappeared. Hitler reportedly received it as a fiftieth birthday gift in 1939; it was possibly in Hitler’s personal possession in his Berlin bunker in 1945; it either burned or was stolen.

    Tomorrow’s radio klassik Stephansdom broadcast features a 2013 recording; Sebastian Weigle leads the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester; Peter Bronder sings Rienzi and Claudia Mahnke sings Adriano. Fortunately for all of us, perhaps, it runs only two hours and 24 minutes.

    The 2026 Bayreuth production is available as a recording on Deutsche Gramophon’s Stage+ platform. The trailer, which looks tempting indeed, can be found here.

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  • Opernabend: Manon Lescaut

    Jules Massenet and Daniel Auber had already written operas based on Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut, a 1731 novel by Abbé Prévost, and when Puccini was reminded of this while composing his own opera in the early 1890s, he had a rejoinder ready: “Manon is a heroine I believe in and therefore she cannot fail to win the hearts of the public,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be two operas about Manon? A woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” Puccini appears to be unaware of the Auber opera. He went on to add, “Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion.”

    The Italian Riccardo Muti brings the same desperate passion to his own 1998 recording of Manon Lescaut for Deutsche Grammophon, which you can hear on radio klassik Stephansdom’s Opernabend tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; Muti leads a La Scala production with Maria Guleghina in the title role, surely enough of a recommendation. “Muti conducts with great passion and much finely calculated rubato, but the recording is a touch coarse in tuttis; bringing the voices forward into a studio rather than a theatre perspective has brightened the chorus, who overwhelm the orchestra in the Act 3 roll-call,” writes Gramophone. You can stream it at the rkS web site here. (And stay tuned afterwards for music by Heinrich Schütz, Robert Schumann, and more.)

    For a taste of Muti’s Manon, watch the below video of the conductor rehearsing the opera’s intermezzo with an unidentified orchestra on YouTube.

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  • Four by four

    Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

    My books have yet to be unpacked, so in the meantime I’ve been busying myself with celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Bayreuth festival and the first production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in its entirety. (You can’t say I don’t know how to have fun.) While at the moment I don’t have 16 hours to devote to all four operas again, I’ve been enjoying Eric Schulz’s 2012 four-part, six hour documentary The World of the Ring on Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage-Plus platform, an ideal introduction to the Ring which even has something for those who already know it well. Fortunately it ranges across a wide variety of approaches to the operas, from a look at Christian Thielemann’s rehearsals with the Wiener Staatsoper to Laurence Dreyfus’s more musicological musings to a really stunning set of observations from the late pianist Stefan Mickisch. The first part, about Das Rheingold, can be found here, and more information about the series is here. If you can possibly find a way to see it, I encourage you to do so.

    The Ring is a tetralogy, and though the number three supposedly possesses certain magical and mystical qualities, the number four appears to do so for German-language culture — at least the German-language culture I have special affinities for. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation is composed of four long sections; and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s landmark Hitler: A Film from Germany stretches its four parts over seven hours. A more impressive coincidence is that these works over more than two centuries have been commenting on and challenging each other. We would not have the Ring that we have (not to mention Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde) were it not for the inspiration that Wagner found in the sage of Frankfurt, and Syberberg’s film wraps its aesthetic concerns around both of them.

    Because each of them invites the spectator, the reader, the listener to approach from not only — and not primarily — an intellectual but also an emotional and sensual perspective, perhaps it’s appropriate to characterize each of them as symphonic in structure and intent: even Schopenhauer and Syberberg emerge from a conception of music as an internal human dynamic that reaches beyond language. Wagner himself seems to have particularly posited Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, performed at the start of the Bayreuth festival every year, as a cornerstone of his own operatic edifice. These four-movement works, by their very substantial size and difficulty, the interweaving of idea and sensuality both within each and among themselves, reach beyond their status as exemplars of German culture to confront human experience itself with their challenges and questions.

    When I do eventually get my books back up on a few shelves, I may delve more deeply into this. I have a retirement coming up, and that 16 hours of Wagner is up there on my list.

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  • Rienzi in Bayreuth and a word of congratulations

    When the Bayreuth Festival opens tomorrow for its 150th season, it will open with a work never presented there before: Richard Wagner’s Rienzi, his third opera, which premiered in Dresden in 1842 and was for many years his most popular opera in Europe (to his considerable chagrin later in life; indeed, he himself barred any production of it at the Festival during his lifetime). Its plot, per Wikipedia:

    The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and then defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

    Rarely performed, the curtain rises in Bayreuth tomorrow, July 26, at 4:00 pm local time. Wagnerians of the United States, however, can turn to Deutsche Grammophone’s Stage+ service to watch it live tomorrow at 10:00 am Eastern time, with repeats at 6:00 pm tomorrow night and 5:00 am on Monday morning. (A Vienna friend offers a few more options.) The production is directed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, while Nathalie Stutzmann takes the podium.

    One of the most moving moments of my last trip to Vienna was my attendance at Mass at the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle on my birthday, where Caldara’s Missa Dolorosa was on the program. So I’m delighted to report that radio klassik Stephansdom‘s music director Ursula Magnes, with whom I had the delight of exchanging a few pleasantries about Heinrich Schütz last year, has been named the new director of the Hofmusikkapelle, beginning on September 1. This is the first time a woman has been named director to the post. Rector Peter Schipka said, “As rector of the Hofburgkapelle and thus as the ecclesiastical responsible for the services in this place, I congratulate Mrs. Ursula Magnes very warmly on her appointment as director of the Hofmusikkapelle, as the first woman in this function. I am delighted by her appointment and look forward to working with her.” I congratulate her too, for what it’s worth; the Hofmusikkapelle is in good hands.

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